Discworld books by other authorsThe Discworld Companion by Terry Pratchett and Stephen BriggsThe Science of the Discworld by Ian StewartThe Science of the Discworld 2 by Ian Stewart thanks ZerotimeThe Streets of Ankh-Morpork by Terry Pratchett and Stephen BriggsThe Discworld Mapp by Terry Pratchett and Stephen BriggsA Tourist Guide to Lancre by Terry Pratchett and Stephen BriggsDeath's Domain by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Briggs

The same as most everyone else who have written on the Pratchett nodes, I think that the Discworld books are incredibly funny and yet also thoughtful. I encourage everyone to give them a try. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

The Librarian - Due to a magical accident, the Librarian is in fact an orangutan. Attempts at turning him back to his old shape have failed, basically because he will do anything to prevent anyone from turning him back again.

Devious Collabone - a.k.a. 'Dragonbreath', performed critical study of shellfish communications in a low-intensity thaumic field. "A good man with a whelk."

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The Discworld books by Terry Pratchett have also been turned into three major CD-ROM and Playstation games. The first two games featured the voice of Eric Idle as the inept Wizzard (deliberately bad spelling), Rincewind. Rincewind used his many-legged (fairly intelligent) Luggage to store items for puzzle-solving. These are excellent, humourous, point-and-click adventures in the vein of the Monkey Island games. Knowledge of the earlier Discworld novels would probably be helpful in playing the games, although not essential.

The last official game was Discworld Noir and is a Pratchett-esque spin on a film noir. Also a point-and-click adventure it seems to be the game that has least relation to the stories of the novels.

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There seems to be a great deal of writing here on the mechanics of Discworld; its inhabitants, its creator, its lore. I was somewhat shocked, then, to find a dearth of scholarship on what the place actually is.

I'm hampered, here, in my usual style of finding Clever and Funny Quotes By Other People and putting them up to introduce the subject. Not because they're hard to find, but because there are so damn many, it's impossible to choose among them. With thirty-seven full books set in Discworld by Mr. Pratchett at the time of this writing, it is certainly one of the most well-chronicled worlds out there whether of the fantasy genre or general literature.

Discworld, at base, is fantasy. Although it contains liberal saltings of other genres, it is incontrovertibly a place where the world is flat, contains magic, and rides on the backs of four enormous elephants who in turn ride on the back of an enormous turtle which swims the stars. As another commenter has said, truly, the only place where an enormous elephant has to cock a leg to let the sun go by.

In sum, the thing that makes Discworld so damn irresistable is that it...is a world. A big one, for all that Sir Pratchett tells us it's a couple thousand miles across. Of course, it helps that light only travels a few miles a second here, I suppose.

In this unbelievable playground, Pratchett treats his creations as props in a magic sandbox to tell us truths about our own world. Not sappy truths about love and life and happiness and evil (although those are there too!) but about things that we would, until a hot second ago, have sworn were indelibly parts of our own modern and sensible world, thank you very much.